Douglas Crockford: Tonight, "Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax." "All the word's a page, and all the men and women merely pointers and clickers." Tonight we're going to start with a contemporary of William Shakespeare: Sir John Harrington, author, poet, the saucy Godson of Queen Elizabeth. He's best remembered today as an inventor. He invented one of the most important inventions in the history of civilization. In fact, the thing which made our modern civilization possible; without it, life would be horrible. This was his invention: the flush toilet.

[laughter]

You see reservoir A, which he fancifully fills with fish. He's a poet. The user interface there is D, at the seat board. F is the control by which the user can cause water to drain from the reservoir down flushing the stool pot, keeping everything clean and fresh and sweet.

In Harrington's time, getting rid of human waste turned out to be a huge problem. The prevailing technologies of the time were cesspits, and chamber pots, which tended to be emptied out of open windows onto the street or whatever happened to be out there. Cities and castles and places where you had a lot of people smelled really, really bad, and there were also huge opportunities for disease. Queen Elizabeth herself was quite annoyed at the way her castle smelled; she complained about it quite bitterly. And at the time they hadn't developed germ theory yet, so they believed that those smells were actually the cause of disease.

This invention promised to be the solution to that. You'd think hooray, at last we've got flush toilets, we can clean the stuff up and get good, but it didn't turn out that way. He built one of these devices for the Queen and she didn't like it. She didn't like it because of the noise it made, that it announced to everybody in the castle that the Queen had just done her Royal Business.

[laughter]

She liked that even less than the threat of disease, which again, she thought was spread by smell, and she definitely smelled what was going on, and it was awful and offensive. It turned out that once we had germ theory we know that was actually caused by fecal contamination of the drinking water. Even so, it was a real problem. But it was not an acceptable solution. It was over two centuries before further inventors came along and refined Harrington's invention, adding things like the S-trap and the siphon and the float valve, which made modern life today possible.

I had a great aunt who lived on a farm house in Minnesota, and she had an outhouse. During the awful, brutal Minnesota winters, she would go out to the outhouse to do her royal business. She was asked, "why don't you get a toilet?" She said, "you don't shit in the house."

[laughter]

The reason I'm telling you this story is because of the name Harrington gave to his invention. He called it Ajax.

[laughter]

In fact, he wrote a book about it, called 'The Metamorphosis of Ajax', which is the theme of tonight's talk.

Now let's fast forward about 409 years and meet this fellow, Jesse James Garrett. Garrett was the founder of a consulting company, Adaptive Path. He's not a programmer, he's a user experience designer, a very good one, and he was working on an assignment with some developers who were trying to create a much more effective and useful web application.